"I'm wondering, what do the American companies that have shows that are broadcast on television and then ported to DVD do? I suppose they use a super expensive hardware encoder like the one you mentioned? Or perhaps, they film in a format that makes for a better NTSC to Pal conversion?"

They'll likely feed to it to a converter such as the Snell Alchemist PhC. That, I believe, operates in one of two modes:

The Video mode is for video camera generated material or similar, that is, when both fields in the picture are not the same. It essentially "remaps time", if that makes sense, and uses motion vector technology to make sure the results are as accurate as possible.

The film mode recognises the original source is Film, performs an Inverse 3:2 pulldown routine (to get the NTSC 60i content back to 23.976fps) and simply speeds the film up to 25fps.

The software converters we have access to are most likely the older Field Blending type. These don't use motion vector technology but result in a picture with more motion blur.